Choreomania: Dance and Disorder

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CONTENTS
List of illustrations
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Choreomania, Another Orientalism
Part I: Excavating Dance in the Archives
1. Obscuritas Antiquitatis: Institutions, Affiliations, Marginalia
2. Madness after Foucault: Medieval Bacchanals
3. Translatio: St. Vitus's Dance, Demonism and the Early Modern
4. The Convulsionaries: Antics on the French Revolutionary Stage
5. Mobiles, Mobs and Monads: Nineteenth-Century Crowd Forms
6. Medecine Retrospective: Hysteria's Archival Drag
Part II: Colonial and Postcolonial Stages: Scenes of Ferment in the Field
7. Sicily Implies Asia and Africa: Tarantellas and Comparative Method
8. Ecstasy-belonging in Madagascar and Brazil
9. Ghost Dancing: Excess, Waste and the American West
10. The Gift of Seeing Resemblances: Cargo Cults in the Antipodes
11. Monstrous Grace: Blackness and the New Dance Crazes
12. Coda: Moving Fields, Modernity and the Bacchic Chorus
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When political protest is read as epidemic madness, religious ecstasy as nervous disease, and angular dance moves as dark and uncouth, the disorder being described is choreomania. At once a catchall term to denote spontaneous gestures and the unruly movements of crowds, choreomania emerged in the nineteenth century at a time of heightened class conflict, nationalist policy, and colonial rule. In this book, author Kélina Gotman examines these choreographies of unrest, rethinking the modern formation of the choreomania concept as it moved across scientific and social scientific disciplines. Reading archives describing dramatic misformationsof bodies and body politicsshe shows how prejudices against expressivity unravel, in turn revealing widespread anxieties about demonstrative agitation. This history of the fitful body complements stories of nineteenth-century discipline and regimentation. As she notes, constraints on movement imply constraints on political power and agency. In each chapter, Gotman confronts the many ways choreomania works as an extension of discourses shaping colonialist orientalism, which alternately depict riotous bodies as dangerously infected others, and as curious bacchanalian remains. Through her research, Gotman also shows how beneath the radar of this colonial discourse, men and women gathered together to repossess on their terms the gestures of social revolt.

Reviews

Theatre Research International

Choreomania is as progressive in its historical methodologies as it is in its provocative analyses of heretofore undertheorized modes of movement, dance and gesture. I have no doubt that it will deeply impact dance and performance studies as a pathbreaking analysis of social bodies in motion as well as an inspiring example of how the durable roots of rigorous critical and historical methodologies strengthen scholarship that stretches so far across geography and time

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